My spirit animal is not a snail... (if it's anything it's a frog or hedgehog) but I do seem to draw a number of the misunderstood slimy ones.

And, actually, there's a fairly good reason for that.

I'm often asked to draw on new screens using apps I've never used before. That's not as hard as it might sound as one slab of glass is generally quite similar to another and most art apps work around a similar rule set.

But each app does have a flavour. Images made in Adobe Ideas will always be completely different to pictures painted in Talkboard. ArtRage has a completely different output to Sketch and so on.

If I'm learning a new app, often with people looking over my shoulder, asking what I think, I like to give as little concentration to what I'm drawing so I can talk and learn and explore as much as possible. That means that I generally draw a Frog, a Squid, a Marmite jar or a Snail. Secretly (don't tell the others) I think the Snail might be my favourite.

The other reason I love drawing snails is that, when I teach, the snail is a relatively simple process to teach people how to draw on a screen. Which always makes me smile, slime is not an obvious subject to paint onto glass (and for an extra stretch task bonus there's a healthy dose of Fibonacci in there too).

The snail above was drawn on a Surface Pro 3 using the built in NTrig pen. I've got a lot of love for Ntrig - some of my favourite devices have used that over the more common and popular Wacom technology and it works perfectly with the MS tablet. I used an app called OneNote which isn't a traditional art app in any sense but is wonderful for a quick doodle. While finishing it off I was catching up with the beginning of the Sky Portrait Artist of the Year final show (which I'd missed first time around) and excellent fun it was too. Hence the limited colour palette. When the show finished I came back to the snail and thought id leave it as is. Sometimes the limitations feel set in the correct place.

Very hopeful there will be some exciting snail news soon. The optimistic dreamer in me has an eye on a snail project that would be utterly wonderful to be a part of.